Tag Archives: Shinji Suzuki

My year long project with Oscar Jonker of Bonsai Empire is finally (whew!) available. This was really a lot of fun to do. Last summer we went to Japan to film at my teacher’s garden, so there are some really eye-bugging trees in it, and then I also spent months crafting the three hours of […]

This month I took a brief trip to Japan… …I was at my teacher’s place in Obuse, Nagano for most of the time, so many of these photos are from his garden…the rest are of the village of Obuse…the surrounding mountains…and there are one or two shots from Tokyo, where I found a bag and […]

…the usual Japan bonsai experience in February. I’m writing this in the snow-socked city of Nagano, 6 hours after my plane left from Narita Airport on the other side of Honshu. Waved vaguely in the direction of my apprentice Bobby Curttright, who enviously left Shinji Suzuki’s garden several days before I did and had a […]

In early 2004, when my apprenticeship with Shinji Suzuki was only four months gone, a TV crew came to make a documentary on apprenticing in bonsai. They focused on the gaijin, me, and after a couple days of filming came up with this eight minute piece that ran on a local channel. Afterwards, quite a […]

The first post I made of the Japan trip suggested I would EVENTUALLY post more photos and tie up some loose ends. One of them was of this black pine that took me a long day of wiring with a shifted apex (there is an iron rod up in that foliage that you can’t see […]

Well, I finally got back there… and I brought quite a few photos back with me. So over the next couple of days I’ll run several posts about the week and a half spent at my teacher’s studio: the people, the nursery, the trees I worked on, even the monkeys. Stay tuned for more posts! […]